Image via WikipediaCanada’s election--stupid is as stupid does
Canadians, in droves, turned up their noses at democracy, choosing a party that has attacked it at every turn. These voters made their electoral decision with one hand holding their wallets and the other flailing around from their eyes to their ears, willfully shutting out the endless evidence that it is the people, and not just Parliament, that Harper holds in contempt. -- Ethan Baron, columnist and new Canadian citizen
http://world.mediamonitors.net/Headlines/Canada-s-election-stupid-is-as-stupid-does
Harper’s Drive to Demolish Dissent
http://canadiandimension.com/articles/3920
The Harper regime has systematically stripped the country of its infrastructure of critical thinking, silencing whistle blowers and voices of dissent, defunding advocacy groups, and undermining the ability of independent organizations to confront the policies of Harper and his helpers.
Examples abound: axing the Law Commission of Canada; firing the managers of Rights and Democracy and replacing them with Harper cronies; humiliating and intimidating diplomat Richard Colvin; muzzling Environment Canada scientists; sacking Linda Keen, President of the Nuclear Safety Commission; gutting the research capacity of women’s organizations or, as in the case of the Status of Women, changing their mandate to exclude “gender equality and political justice”; revoking funding for the likes of Sisters of the Spirit and the National Association of Women and the Law; eliminating most of the grant moneys for many progressive magazines; defunding research, human rights and advocacy organizations like Alternatives, Kairos, and Climate Action Network. The Voices–Voix coalition has assembled a list of some hundred organizations defunded or otherwise silenced by the Harper government over the past few years.
Harper’s Hitlist
http://canadiandimension.com/articles/3926
The scrawled note that evaded the redactor’s pen – unlike so many Afghan detainee files – did more than to cast Kairos into the ever-growing pile of Canadian organizations and individuals that have been, to borrow Jason Kenney’s euphemism, “defunded.” It also cemented the realization, for many Canadians, that the crucial boundary protecting nonpartisan limbs of the state from the ideological zeal of the sitting government has been breached in a way that we have not seen before.
The recent case of Manitoba Justice Robert Dewar notwithstanding, all is well within the increasingly politicized Canadian judiciary, judging by the casual briskness with which funding was revoked for the Court Challenges Program, Law Reform Commission of Canada, Sisters in Spirit, and the National Association of Women and the Law. And in the unfortunate event that the courts do not prove amenable? No matter, as the government’s willingness to engage in a protracted legal battle to drain the coffers of Vancouver’s Insite safe injection clinic makes clear. And let’s not even get started on Maher Arar.
If this trend does indeed mark the beginnings of a culture shift, we can be heartened by the fact that those affected have begun to push back: the Voices-Voix project formed in April, 2010 with a mandate to compile a list of organizations and individuals who have been defunded, fired, forced out, or disparaged publicly by the Harper Government, or who have resigned in protest.
Currently endorsed by over two hundred organizations, the Voices-Voix declaration charges that the federal government has “systematically undermined democratic institutions and practices, and has eroded the protection of free speech, and other fundamental human rights. It has deliberately set out to silence the voices of organizations or individuals who raise concerns about government policies or disagree with government positions.” In this case Bev Oda may be the lightning rod, but the scandal is systemic. We are left to hope that someone is listening.
Why don't we love our intellectuals?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/08/britain-public-intellectuals
One of the distinctive aspects of British culture is that the word "intellectual" seems to be regarded as a term of abuse. WH Auden summed it up neatly when he wrote: "To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, / Is a keen observer of life,/ The word 'Intellectual' suggests right away/ A man who's untrue to his wife."
What it amounts to is the belief that the course of British history has been so exceptionally smooth – with its adaptable aristocracy, (relatively) tolerant church, apolitical military and reformist bourgeoisie – that there was no call for the evolution of an oppositional intelligentsia. So the fact that there are no intellectuals in Britain is something to be proud of. It's a byproduct of the Whig interpretation of history.
This strikes me as baloney, mostly derived from a comprehensive misunderstanding of other cultures – a species of what Collini calls "Dreyfus envy", after the celebrated late 19th-century affair in which intellectuals took on the French establishment and won. Intellectuals may enjoy a higher celebrity status across the Channel but I can see little evidence that France is more governed by ideas than is Britain. Part of the problem is that our stereotypical image of the public intellectual is a continental one – and largely embodied by Jean-Paul Sartre and his long-time accomplice, Simone de Beauvoir. The fact that (as we discovered after their deaths) they were devious, manipulative, hypocritical and – in Sartre's case at least – ludicrously credulous about authoritarian regimes has tarnished their lustre somewhat. But much the same could be said of many of the other public intellectuals of yesteryear: think of Arthur Koestler, who specialised in treating people abominably while writing the sublime Darkness at Noon, or of the British intellectuals of the 1930s who so admired Stalin, even as he was slaughtering his own people.
Rationalizations for Bigotry: A Recent History
A Day Without Cars
Kanesatake and a Canadian Mine
Controversial niobium mine is receiving little public attention
http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/3972Despite the past history of tensions and widespread opposition to the current proposal within the Mohawk community of Kanesatake, the proposed mining project has remained under the radar: even as the company continues to lobby government officials and push forward with the project, little media or mainstream political focus has been paid to the issue. Residents of Kanesatake, though, are not letting their guard down in the face of the mining project.
A mine like this will be detrimental to our water table and our health in general,” says Nicholas, in an urgent tone. “About 90 per cent of our homes in Kanesatake use well water every day, and once those aquifers are disturbed for mining use there is no guarantee that our water will be safe anymore.”
“Local farmers living close to where the mine would be situated are totally opposed and are expressing outrage that this mine would position itself right in the middle of the farming area,” Kanesatake resident Walter David
“Agricultural workers are growing many fruits and vegetables on these lands just beside Montreal. Do we want toxic chemicals entering our food and water supply?"
- ( As I note repeatedly, Iran is punished for daring to forgo nuclear weapons technology...a Nuclear Nonproliferation Proponent )
Precarious Workers, Precarious Lives: Ontario’s Private Health Care Secret
http://canadiandimension.com/articles/3973
Overcrowding in Ontario’s hospitals is a chronic problem that has forced the provincial government to evict people from hospital beds before they are healthy.
With Ontario’s senior population projected to double in the next 16 years, senior care is big business and numerous companies are cashing in at the expense of both workers and clients. Six large corporations now hold 76 percent of home care nursing contracts. In 1995 eight agencies held 66 percent of the contracts. Small community-based agencies have been virtually eliminated from the sector. US-based for-profit mega-health corporations like Extendicare—North America’s largest private senior-care provider—have set up shop across Canada and are now making profits upwards of $100 million a year.
Bad Education
http://nplusonemag.com/bad-education
The Project On Student Debt estimates that the average college senior in 2009 graduated with $24,000 in outstanding loans. While college applicants’ faith in the value of higher education has only increased, employers’ has declined. According to Richard Rothstein at The Economic Policy Institute, wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished. Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007 recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.
What kind of incentives motivate lenders to continue awarding six-figure sums to teenagers facing both the worst youth unemployment rate in decades and an increasingly competitive global workforce?
....Over $800 billion in outstanding student debt, over 30 percent of it securitized, and the federal government directly or indirectly on the hook for almost all of it.
If this sounds familiar, it probably should, and the parallels with the pre-crisis housing market don’t end there. The most predatory and cynical subprime lending has its analogue in for-profit colleges. Inequalities in US primary and secondary education previously meant that a large slice of the working class never got a chance to take on the large debts associated with four-year degree programs.
The lessons of the housing crash nag: What happens when the kids can’t pay?
If you’re enrolled in four college classes right now, you have a pretty good chance that one of the four will be taught by someone who has earned a doctorate and whose teaching, scholarship, and service to the profession has undergone the intensive peer scrutiny associated with the tenure system. In your other three classes, however, you are likely to be taught by someone who has started a degree but not finished it; was hired by a manager, not professional peers; may never publish in the field she is teaching; got into the pool of persons being considered for the job because she was willing to work for wages around the official poverty line (often under the delusion that she could ‘work her way into’ a tenurable position); and does not plan to be working at your institution three years from now.
What Defines a Meme?
Our world is a place where information can behave like human genes and ideas can replicate, mutate and evolve
- By James Gleick
- “Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms,” he wrote. “Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role.”
Ideas have “spreading power,” he noted—“infectivity, as it were”—and some more than others. An example of an infectious idea might be a religious ideology that gains sway over a large group of people. The American neurophysiologist Roger Sperry had put forward a similar notion several years earlier, arguing that ideas are “just as real” as the neurons they inhabit. Ideas have power, he said:
Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet.
Monod added, “I shall not hazard a theory of the selection of ideas.”
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Defines-a-Meme.html?c=y&story=fullstory
Canada’s Conservatives to Push for Iran Sanctions
Israeli nukes not a concern
http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/3347
In the lead-up to the G8 summit in Canada, Conservative politicians in Ottawa are pushing publicly for increased sanctions on Iran.
Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon has indicated he will lobby for severe sanctions at the elite summit, to take place June 25-27, 2010.
“Canada will continue to use its G8 presidency to focus international attention and action on Iran,” a representative of the office of Minister Cannon told The Dominion. “We believe that further sanctions authorized by the United Nations Security Council are needed.”
China’s reluctance to back US attempts to introduce strict sanctions on Iran has set the stage for the upcoming G8 summit to serve as gathering where the US and Canada will unite in favour of a more hard-line position on Iran. China holds a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, but it is not a member country of the G8.
( As I reiterate - it seems constantly - Iran, North Korea and Iraq were reviled and penalized for daring to support the proposition that nuclear power need not automatically lead to nuclear arms...for which temerity they have paid and are paying dearly in economic warfare and blockade. )
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